Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.

And, lo, has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light!

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable: Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’

Cosas de España

ThinkSpain advises us that:-

• Food price inflation in Spain is settling down, with the rate of price rises having halved since 2022. But it remains well above the European Union average. Why?
• The housing market showed recovery in January, after 12 months of decline

New to me . . . Franco’s brutalist new villages.

British columnist Peter Hitchens is upset about the punishment of that full-on public kiss. I guess he’d be just as outraged even if he knew that Spanish prosecutors always ask for sentences well beyond those eventually given. And that no one actually goes to jail if the sentence is 2 years or less.

The UK

Progress? Totally at odds with the national stereotype of Brits as emotionally repressed cold fishes, new ‘research’ has found that they’re a bunch of self-involved overs-harers who, given half a chance, will burden their nearest colleague with uninvited, graphic insights into their private life Said research claims that 20% of Brits are subject to TMI — too much information — on the sex life, financial life, physical or mental health of a work colleague every bloody day. Women get it worse — 29% feel regularly overshared upon, compared with 10% of men. . . . Inevitably, celebrity behaviours trickle down, and now? Here we are, with everyone — famous or otherwise — attempting to live self-actualised, semi-therapised and In Their Truth. Also to blame is social media for rewarding self-involvement, rebranding it as “authenticity”, “inspirational” and “brave”. And that mental health call-to-action of a few years back when we all had to ask one another: “No — how are you really?”, because some people never stopped telling us. And tracking apps, Zoe glucose patches and Oura performance monitoring rings for giving people licence to not just tell you how many hours of top-quality sleep they got the night before, or how quickly they metabolise a muffin, but also, to show you, on their app! Tech has made a show-and-tell of TMI, a pie chart, a Ted talk, a full-blooded spreadsheet presentation!

Germany

Learning the language:

• 1. Someone struggles with the challenge.
• 2. For new readers, a famous article by Mark Twain I was reminded of.

The USA

The Democratic party is now indisputably woke, says this columnist. I’ve no idea whether that’s true or not but it certainly seems plausible.

Social Media

Just in case you were in any doubt . . . The internet is not just a nasty place that we can conveniently assume hosts the worst of human behaviour, triggered into derangement by anonymity and a goading algorithm. It’s even worse than that.

Did you know? . . .

In the momentous year of 1517, the Elector of Saxony was named Frederick. He was a sponsor of Martin Luther, whom he appointed – when they were both still Catholics – to the position of Professor of Bible Studies at his new university of Wittenberg. So pious a Catholic was Fred, that he had a collection of more than 19,000 religious relics. These included:-

• A thorn from Jesus’s cross
• A fragment of the True Cross
• A bit of Baby Jesus’s manger
• A twig from the burning bush seen by Moses
• The swaddling clothes of baby Jesus
• A lock of the Virgin Mary’s hair, and
• The entire corpse of one of the Innocents slain by Herod’s soldiers.

The collection was so extensive that, according to Catholic doctrine of that age, if you came on pilgrimage and venerated all the relics, it would reduce your time in Purgatory by more than a million years. Which was not to be sniffed at. The Elector – in due course a defender of Luther against the Church – was known as Frederick The Wise. I think we’re entitled to ask whether the piss wasn’t being taken in this instance. And whether Frederick the Staggeringly Gullible wouldn’t rank as one of the better alternatives.

Finally .

I’ve said that I recently re-discovered Reddit. Here’s something about its transformation over the years I wasn’t accessing it. When it transitioned from cesspit to stock market member. Misogynists and bullies. it says here, were drawn to the free-wheeling social network for years. Now it’s worth $8bn — and is cleaning up its content for free

Finally, Finally . .

As it’s the start of the month . . . Some readers, I hope, will know that the verse I cite at the top of my posts is the opening quatrain of Fitzgerald’s wonderful – but very ‘free’ – translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which you can read about here. Some verses are well known, of course, eg:-

The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

My favourite:-

Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
doctor and saint, and heard great argument
about it and about: but evermore
came out by the same door as in I went.

The Usual Links . . .

You can get my posts by email as soon as they’re published. With the added bonus that they’ll contain the typos I’ll discover later. I believe there’s a box for this at the bottom of each post. I guess it’s logical that this doesn’t appear on the version given to me . . .

For new readers:– If you’ve landed here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try here. If you’re passing through Pontevedra on the Camino, you’ll find a guide to the city there – updated a bit in early July 2023.

For those thinking of moving to Spain:- This is an extremely comprehensive and accurate guide to the challenge, written by a Brit who lives in both the North and the South and who’s very involved in helping Camino walkers. And this is something on the so-called Beckham Rule, which is beneficial – tax-wise – for folk who want to work here.